Humam Hammoudi, head of Iraq's constitutional drafting committee , told reporters Tuesday that it was unlikely that the three additional days provided by the National Assembly to settle differences over the charter would be sufficient to solve all the outstanding issues in the proposed draft . The committee deferred a vote on the draft Monday [...]

Suicide and Homicide in State Prison and Local Jails, US Department of Justice, August 22, 2005 . Excerpt: Over the past two decades, State prison and local jail inmate mortality rates have displayed some dynamic changes. Suicide was the leading cause of death among jail inmates in 1983 (129 per 100,000 inmates); by 1993 that [...]

Leading Monday's corporations and securities law news, the Financial Times is reporting that the US Department of Justice is nearing a settlement with Big Four accounting firm KPMG . KPMG has been under investigation for its creation and marketing of illegal tax shelters and in June, KPMG publicly accepted responsibility for the illegal actions of [...]

The US military announced Monday that three more detainees from Iran, Yemen and Tajikistan respectively have been released from the US terror suspect detention facility at Guantanamo Bay and sent home to their own countries. US Defense Department Combatant Status Review Tribunals had found the Yemeni and Tajik prisoners improperly classed as "enemy combatants" posing [...]

JURIST is looking for talented, public-service oriented law students from law schools in the US and abroad to join our team of real-time legal news editors this fall. From Los Angeles to London, from Chicago to Cairo – if you're a law student looking for intensive research, writing and editing experience and your own byline [...]

Leading Monday's states brief, the California Supreme Court today extended child support laws and custody rights to estranged gay and lesbian couples who used reproductive science to conceive by ruling that same-sex couples who raise children are the lawful parents and must provide for the children after a break up. The legal director of the [...]

Glenn Allen Powell, a former employee of Halliburton subsidiary Kellogg Brown and Root (KBR) , has pleaded guilty to charges that he accepted bribes and defrauded the US government when awarding a contract to an Iraqi company in 2004. According to the plea agreement, KBR discovered during an internal investigation that Powell had accepted more [...]

Iraqi constitutional negotiators who submitted a draft constitution to Iraq's National Assembly shortly before the deadline at midnight local time Monday have withdrawn it in the face of continued Sunni opposition, and the Assembly has adjourned without voting in a bid to avoid its own dissolution in the absense of an accepted charter. A senior [...]

The US Supreme Court refused to rehear the Kelo v. New London eminent domain case Monday, without comment. In June the justices held by a 5-4 margin that the local authority in New London, Connecticut could expropriate private land, homes and businesses for private redevelopment confering economic benefits on the community such as more jobs [...]

AP is reporting that the speaker of Iraq's National Assembly has said that the draft constitution has been submitted ahead of the midnight deadline, but that there remain "pending points" that parties will try to resolve within the next three days. Earlier Monday, there were reports that Shiite, Kurdish and Sunni Arab negotiators continued to [...]